TED 2008: Venter’s new life

Genetics pioneer Craig Venter shook things up at the TED conference in Monterey Thursday when he told the crowd he was getting closer to creating a synthetic form of life.

Venter, who famously sequenced his own genome back in 2001, has been working on isolating a genome and using it to create a single, sustainable, living cell. And he believes he’ll succeed within the next year.

The details of the work are fiendishly complex — and we here at The Tech Chronicles won’t pretend to understand the nitty gritty — but the possible applications of Venter’s work are fascinating… and controversial.

First, the fascinating. Imagine an organism that consumes carbon dioxide and can be used to battle global warming. A new species that can chemically generate fuel. Or a life form that helps create vaccines or antibiotics.

Those are the kinds of things Venter and his team at the J. Craig Venter Institute are hoping for. But before they get there, they had to ponder some pretty big, and pretty scary, questions.

“What is life? Can we pare it down to its most basic components? Can we digitize it? Can we regenerate life or generate new life out of the digital world?” Venter asked the audience in his presentation. The answer to all of those questions, apparently, is yes.

“We have to use biodesign to achieve the effects we need,” said Venter, before uncorking the best line of the week. “It would change the nature of sex quite a bit. …”

As concerning as that last part might seem to some, it might be the least controversial aspect of Venter’s work. What about the Frankenstein aspects here? Is this safe?

A number of attendees pressed Venter on the ethical issues and here’s what he had to say:

“Fortunately, there’s not that many people on this planet wanting to do harm with these tools. Very few biological agents that we work with … could be weaponized. But it is an important issue. Every new technology has the ability to be abused.”

Wherever you come down on the issue, Venter’s pioneering work in the field he calls “synthetic genomics” is truly groundbreaking. It will be fascinating to see how our culture responds to the work as his team grows closer to actually creating life.